Kick off your most innovative year yet!

Students taking part in one of last year's Mashup events at Venture Centre.Photo/Venture Centre

Calling all teen dreamers, doers, makers, and entrepreneurs…

Every year Venture Centre is proud to support high-school students to take part in the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) through its MADVentures initiative for young people.

MADVentures, supported by Tauranga and Western Bay Councils, weaves together in-school (like YES) and out-of-school experiences (like the Saturday ideation workshop ‘Mini Mashup’) for young entrepreneurs.

YES teaches secondary school students the skills, mostly during school hours, to develop ideas into solid, well-formed business plans. Every year students from across Bay of Plenty take part in the hope of competing in the national awards at the end of the year (and do work on their companies out-of-school to make that happen!).

This year, YES begins with KickStart Tīmata on February 16. It’s an opportunity to find out about the programme before starting work on forming a company for YES.

The KickStart event includes brainstorming ideas for products and services and doing a ‘once over lightly’ of things which need to be done to go-to-market. Each company then receives feedback on from local business people.

Side note: If you’re a local business person reading this and you think our entrepreneurial teens would benefit from your expertise and feedback, please click here to get in touch. We have several openings for mentors, and know that local mentors will understand our local youth, and its needs, best!

Ok, back to the students… Business teachers usually register their class for KickStart, but if you’re not taking business studies and still want to take part you can! Click here to get in touch and we can help you get to be part of this epic KickStart event, and then get on to YES which continues throughout the year.

But whether you’ve been part of KickStart or not, you’ll have the opportunity to take part in MADVentures Mini Mashup ideation workshop on March 3 at Basestation.

If you see you things in the world you want to change, or come up with new ideas but give up on them, or if you want to do something but don’t know how to make it happen, then Mini Mashup is for you.

Mini Mashup is a Saturday workshop to help you come up with ideas for projects by exploring your passions and identifying problems in your community.

You’ll work out what problems are worth solving, get introduced to ways to develop your ideas, and pick-up business startup skills by doing work on real challenges.

You will walk away with an experience that will increase the likelihood of your idea being successful. You’ll have some understanding of the feasibility (whether it can be done), relevance (will someone find it useful and pay for it) and impact (will it make a difference) of your idea.

You may even come away surprised at how big your idea could be (known as ‘scale’).

Thanks to generous sponsors, the Mini Mashup workshop is free to enter for students in years 10 to 13 in Bay of Plenty schools, or age 14+ if homeschooled or unschooled.

If you’re still not sure if YES or Mini Mashup is for you, click here to read more about last year’s regional YES winners who took part in both these events.

- Venture Centre works to connect people on enterprising journeys - with each other and the mindset, skillset, toolsets, networks and resources they need - to build an ecosystem that delivers real-world, learn-by-doing events, activities, projects and experiences, and more. This would not be possible without the support of Tauranga City and Western Bay of Plenty District Councils.

If you would like to add your support or get involved with this work to help build entrepreneurially capable, digitally and commercially empowered communities who contribute and benefit from the resulting prosperity and wellbeing, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

About

MADVentures is a curated suite of programmes, events, and workshops designed to support the digital and entrepreneurial capability of young people. It exists to inspire and equip them with the skills, tools, mindset and connections they need to make a dent in the universe.